Bad Salad
by breybri4tes
Summary: The city is cold in its dry, drab, grey, and I lie dressed in my winter clothes. The snow is cold on my cheek, yet the dancing snowflakes in the air fall warm, like a sad ballad- and I wonder, was it to celebrate my fall?
1. Grey cities

_I came_

_I saw_

_I conquered_

_Yet in a sea of faces, I recognise no one._

_The city is plain in its dry, drab, grey, and I lie dressed in my winter clothes. The snow is cold on my cheek, yet the dancing snowflakes in the air fall warm, like a sad ballad- and I wonder, was it to celebrate my fall?_

_I am bored with my life. There are cars that pass and slow down and passer bys that gasp in mortification, but my blood stains the white carpet like the leaves of weeping willows, and no one cleans up. My mouth hangs open with no words, and it is quiet, with only the rushing of wind and my wordless silence._

_I could talk for eternity about the fall. It was most tantalising- my gut would lurch to my throat, my arms and legs spread in free fall, catapulting from the grey skyscraper, falling through the thick grey clouds, and I see the world; grey and white, going fast, fast, faster than my mouth runs. I taste my tears and snow in my mouth, and I think that the snowflakes look like teardrops in the air. But I leave them behind, I laugh soundlessly, laugh at the plainness of the 'bright' city, laugh at the silence without me to fill it. Laugh at the people who refused to listen, laugh at my laugh that bestowed no emotion upon my face; laugh when I hit the ground and cried from the pain of broken bones. I prefer that to the two words that hurt me most. I look like concrete, I feel like concrete, but I think I feel alive._

_I am bored with my life. My bright red life-blood is a refreshing start to the city of grey, and my fall felt like flight._

_I am bored with my life._

_I am bored with my life._

_I am bored with my life..._


	2. Children and Dentists

_He wakes, each morning, to the dim, grey world, lit by white lights and sunshine that never reached his heart. It was cold each time- the air conditioning failed to bring up the temperature, and huddled in the blanket, he saw the blackened branches of sleeping trees. The pyjamas they offered were thin like paper, white and striped in blue, and even then the lines were thin and the blue wasn't bright. _

_It was like monotony each morning. _

_Tick, tick, tick, the clock goes, and with every passing second he wants to close his eyes, remember more of the looming skyscraper... _

_He wants to return. _

_I, too, want to return._

* * *

There are a number of medication he has to take each day. He dreads the time, he does- he dreads it and hates it with the cold passion of snowstorms. The trays filled with pills and bottles are blasphemous to him. It is the pinnacle of humiliation- humans, as powerful and big and bad as the books make them out to be, writhing in beds, drugged up on dull coloured water and compacted powder- dependent on chemical formulae that serve only to weaken them more.

He understands that they will provide aid in the long run. Eventually, the sick would rise and prance in their gardens, and the nurses would applaud and put away the bottled prisons. But he seeks solace in knives and pens, scratched into skin; he wants relief. He likes his blood on the sheets, running down his arm, like the words that drip from his mouth, except that no one has to listen. He starves himself each day, because his belly is full of things he has to say. He scratches his throat and draws on the walls, but he has endless things he wants to talk about. They hear the tapping of his pen across the walls and he has blood in his nails, and may a time they had to pry the knife away and get yelled at, yet when they ask, he only hisses and glares.

He shivers at night, not from the cold, but from rage, from the fire in his gut. He hates himself- he hates the level of hell he had plunged himself into. He feels like he is a hundred miles deep under the mud, but he hears everything- the crying cicadas, the weeping willows, the clicking of his mind as he rambles on inwardly about things no one will listen to. He hates that he is dependent on medicines, he hates that he is dependent on scissors and blades; hates that he has to be here. He does not deserve to be here. He is higher, higher. He should not be here.

Oh, if only he had died that quiet afternoon. But he is sedated, tied down, and he refuses to cry.

* * *

He looks over the nurses with condescension.

They never knock before they enter, and most of them are loud. He hears the impatient clanging of steel and metal, bottles knocking against each other, and he hides his knives away. He cannot wash the drawings off the wall, but he likes to irritate them. He could never anger them- sweet, _sweet_ nurses, _angels_ dressed in white, he could never anger them, _could he_?- but he would do all in his power to show that he would go against them, no matter what they did. Why, he would dye his hair and write vulgarities across his forehead, but he considers it too, well, _vulgar_. He would prove himself superior to pretentious people who always forget to knock on doors. He glares them down, the mean-faced nurses that dare challenge him, and he calculates in his mind; takes note of their rushed procedures, the slight impatience in their angelic voices, and he makes sure that even as they left, he fixes his penetrative gaze on their backs.

He spits out the pills and gargles for five minutes afterwards.

* * *

"But you have to, darling," The sweet voice accentuates. "It's good for your health." She holds out the spoon further out towards him, and he sees it as a sword, a threat. He thinks her smile is sick. He thinks that she is the sick one, even though she wears no make-up at all.

He shakes his head fervently, violently, and he growls and hisses, retreating further into the bed corner. The metal corner pokes into his shoulder, hard, but he doesn't scream, not yet.

"Come on now. Be good, for us."

She remains at her position, and he is almost content to trust her- she had been patient- but his mind compels him to turn against everything in the world. He screeches and yanks out the IV needle in his arm, tumbles to the ground, bounces against the cold, hard slipperiness of the plastic floors. The nurse gasps in surprise and slams down the medicine spoon, and the tray slides as she stands swiftly up. He shouts at her incoherently and the knife spills from his pocket. She runs and he clambers, screams and shouts as she wrestles, kicks at the air and squeezes his eyes shut. His arm hurts where the needle was torn violently out, and he picks out a syringe in her hand with the corner of his eyes.

He holds his head high as he yells for the final time that morning, holds his head high as he feels a prick at the back of his neck. He holds his head high and glares into the nurse's eyes as he falters, mellowing and losing his grip.

He holds his head high as it lolls to the side, and he sees a boy peering in from the small door window, sees a boy with a white shirt, sleek black hair, and _beautiful_ kaleidoscope eyes.

He sleeps, and he doesn't wake, but when he does, he is tied down yet again, his knife gone, the walls dry, and he sees him there.


	3. Something?

_Each time he sleeps, he dreams of the same thing. He dreams of his waking, in a greyscale room, where no one speaks and all noise is mute. It feels light and heavy at the same time, and the imbalance it strikes in his bones drives him nearly over the edge. It is difficult to move a heavy body through such thin air that dances carefully out of his way, like brittle stars. He thinks he sees his reflection in a house of mirrors, but in actual fact, he is seeing me through a wall of glass, as I am seeing him._

_I once again attempt to reach out to him as I raise my hand to meet his across the cold glass wall. He responds in tandem, raising his own to meet mine, light and unfeeling across the clear border. As always, he does not react well, and I watch as he dissipates into little spots of powdered colour that add on to those left behind by the previous dreams. _

_And as always, when he wakes, he forgets._

* * *

He wakes to a boy by the bedside, rocking in the plastic chair, an unlit cigarette hanging in his thin-lipped mouth. He is silent, but only for now, and Kankri sees that he is fidgeting, playing with his fingers. A guitar case leans on the pale blue walls. Silver disks spell out a name that rings with mystery and grandeur; Cronus Ampora, Kankri reads. Cronus, the name of a Greek god; Ampora, a word that struck into him the image of grand mausoleums, arches and bridges, domes and rotten sand from once glamorous, magnificent buildings.

_Empire of the Greek gods. _

The stranger had yet to notice the waking boy yet, and Kankri opted to return to slumber.

_If he is an emissary, I pray that he might free me._

* * *

The next time he woke, the dull ache in his head had since died down, reduced only to a soft buzzing that seemed more comforting as it was painful. But the world was blurred, and the lethargy hadn't left his limbs yet. They felt like jelly- trembling under the melting stars, soft and wobbly, boneless. The padded leather straps are numb to his skin save for the slight stuffiness in the areas they climbed over. This was one of the more despicable parts of his outbursts. Hanging in the haphazard lingo between numbness and feeling, where he can neither reach nor move for one, coddled by cotton spun out of threads tightly locked together, locked in the echo of his severed senses. Yet the sun was still up, and the meticulously oiled hair still gleamed in the dappled light.

He sighed in disappointment- his date wasn't due yet, after all.

The little pocket of air that escaped Kankri's lungs was loud in the deafeningly silent room, and the stranger, glad to catch onto a dampening noise, was quick to fix the entirety of his attention to the held-down fireball that was the punished patient.

They remained as they were for a few minutes, unblinking, caught in each other's gazes, yet at the same time shielded and constantly distancing- almost as though in a wavering trance, dimming and sparking, intertwining with the rise and ebb of the faltering quiet, but in reality, it was a tiger and a shark rounding each other up; only that the tiger was wounded, and the shark had no idea he was supposed to be a shark.

It ended with an accidental giggle that leaked out of the stranger's mouth, like a chain of bells, and Kankri huffed, turned away, wrinkling his nose. What unfunny circumstance.

"So, I see you're awake, chief," the stranger began, putting a hand down only to finger the cigarette with his other. He grinned coyly. "Top o' the mornin' to ya, eh?" His words dripped with playfulness dusted with friendly sarcasm, but to Kankri, they dripped with venom enough to threaten.

Kankri growled and retreated. He did not like people mocking him- _he didn't deserve to be here, they must not make fun of him, they must not, they mustnot theymustnot theymustnottheymustnottheymustnot_- His morning had already gone down the filthy drains of sleep, he could see it on the bedsheets, drained from his veins. He was sure the boy knew that too. There was a mischievous glint in those sick, beautiful eyes, and Kankri felt his own guts wrench angrily as he thought of those kaleidoscopes melting into the endless black that they were. The conflict in him was painful. He so very much wanted to scratch out the stranger's orbs, but at the same time, he wanted those eyes to be the very ones that sparked and died at the words that he would say in the future.

_But alas! If even my parents will not let me speak, who is he to want to listen?_

"Well," he continued, holding on to the wisps of what was left of the greeting in the air. "Not gonna talk, yeah?" He swung a leg up to rest on the other knee and drummed his fingers on his calf, shrugging. "Figures. Old man behaves like that too. Won't talk, not even to a pretty lady. Nurses get a hard time."

_They're ugly._

_But he couldn't possibly tell that to him, or to them, could he?_

_After all, he did shut up to make them happy._

* * *

He was very talkative, the stranger in this strange room.

The silence that ate away at Kankri's ears dissolved into the porous clarity of the boy's one-sided conversation. It sent a low drone into his brain, but it was more of a comfort than an annoyance, unlike the honeyed words of nurses and their poison and the null numbness of void. He was erratic, hopping from topic to topic in the most bizarre of ways that Kankri felt his own head starting to pound, as though a rabbit were inside, bounding happily in a bleak setting. It was interesting, to say the least, if he excused the poor grammar structure and bombastic, new, foreign vocabulary.

_Something new._

He didn't find the boy too nice to listen to, however- he slurred his words, a heavy Irish accent, yet sounded drunk and Polish at the same time too- but he thought he wouldn't point that out, not yet.

_What if he stopped talking, just like he himself did so long ago?_ _He thought back to the pool of bright red in a grey, snowing cityscape. Would he let it happen to this new boy?_

He let his eyes wander, scrutinise, to the meticulously styled hair, sleek, black, healthily oily under the dimming sunshine, the rich, golden skin tone, the scars scratched into the guy's skin, just above his wondrous purple eyes. He was a beauty, work of art; why wasn't he in a modelling school? The white shirt he wore only accentuated the well toned physique. Kankri suddenly felt small- why would whichever deity who hasn't forsaken him yet sent such perfection to a sickly, destructive boy as him?

**"You deserve nothing."**

_Not even an ordinary, piece of shit kind of man like you are, father? Why! I do think I deserve better than that. _

He looked, once again, at the seemingly contented stranger, happy with his own voice, satisfied with Kankri's presence, and for reasons unknown, Kankri was alright. He felt unsafe, yet secure at the same time- he was stepping into dangerous boundaries, allowing his fondness for the stranger to grow. Yes, he thought. I want him here to listen. Soon. Not now. Someday, I want him here to listen. He curled further into the thin blankets, drowning in the lull of the visitor's words, doubting the world, doubting the Gods, doubting himself.

But Kankri was alright.

* * *

His downcast eyes swung up immediately to the plastic door hinge as it squeaked and turned, and a nurse came in, bearing nothing but her clothes and her perfume. Kankri narrowed his eyes, almost growling, but the scraping of chair legs behind him changed his mind.

_I musn't make him dislike me._

It was rose scented- he knew, because just this morning he saw her putting it on- and he'd expected it to be mellow, and nice, but instead it came like a sharp pang to the nose, and he was unable to protest, just like how he cannot stop his new 'friend' from going. It seemed almost to taunt him.

"And I s'pose ya gonn' say, 'Visitin' hours are over', yeah?" The supposed Irishman laughed, picking up his guitar bag and slinging it over his shoulder. "No worries about that, pretty maiden. I been 'ere along my pa 'nough to know my due." Kankri's gut clenched. Pretty was an overstatement- the lady's lips were so thick and red they looked like fresh blood sausages, her mascara's smudged, her nose's too big, and she looked like she just walked out of a turbulent airplane sicker than a sex joke maker-

"Oh, I don't think I gave you my name." Kankri snapped his train of thought, and looked up to focus on the teenager that had spent the entirety of the afternoon with him. "The name's Cronus."

Kankri repeated the name mentally. Cronus. What a beautiful name.

_Too beautiful for him to say in front of the nurse._

Cronus waited for Kankri to reply, but the latter only maintained his level gaze, gazing with an unreadable expression bordering between nonchalance and outright defiance.

"Well," Cronus wavered and stuttered, after a long moment and an irritated noise from the nurse. "Rest of ta' day t' ya, bub."

_The door closed behind him, and the room was once again returned to the silence Kankri was no longer familiar with._


End file.
